A Splendor Wild and Terrifying

On a summer afternoon when restlessness nudged me from my vacation cabin, I hiked into the forest, taking no compass or map or GPS or cell phone, and without informing anyone, including myself, of where I was headed or when I expected to be back. About an hour later, I spotted a small stand of old-growth timber that I’d never noticed before and hurried toward it, as if to overtake the hemlocks and maples before they could flee, and then to another such stand, where again I gazed upward with the awe I usually feel when in the presence of old trees. While departing the second stand, I realized I had lost my bearings and didn’t know the direction back to my cabin. As if I were Jonah and the six million acres of Adirondack forest a leviathan that had swallowed me.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened. Every so often, on impulse, I enter the wild unprepared. My passion for the great outdoors is rooted in a 19th-century American view of wild places as versions of prelapsarian Eden. In landscape paintings of the Hudson River School, nature often emits the radiant light of divine immanence. Many of the painters associated with the movement embraced transcendentalism—“a para-religion,” writes art historian Barbara Novak, characterized by a belief in a trinity of nature, God, and man. It’s hard for me to resist the call of divinity. Yet when I’m lost in the wild, I’m merely a vulnerable creature. And God circles me hungrily.

Remnants of transcendentalism, evident in the eternally sunny work of some contemporary landscape painters and photographers, captivated me during my youth, but I’m now skeptical of all varieties of spiritual reductionism. And I wonder how many artists of the Hudson River School ever got lost in the woods. My skepticism might be a consequence of my too-frequent experience of losing my way. Or maybe it springs from the knowledge that death is a fact of nature that’s now near enough to have come into my focus. Probably both. Whenever I lose my bearings in a large forest, even if briefly and even if I do have a compass and map, I understand why Joyce Carol Oates declared, in her essay “Against Nature,” that nature “has no instructions for mankind except that our poor beleaguered humanist-democratic way of life, our fantasies of the individual’s high worth, our sense that the weak, no less than the strong, have a right to survive, are absurd.”

The day I lost my bearings in those stands of old-growth timber, I reached my vacation cabin in the fade of evening. The landscape had digested my wanderlust and had regurgitated me. I had muddied my pants to the knees in a beaver channel, and since I felt too exhausted to remove my oozing boots, brackish water puddled on the floor around me. I did manage to light the oil lamps and grab a bottle of whiskey from a cupboard. One of my conflicting conceptions of the Adirondacks, one contrary to transcendentalism and evident in my decoration of the cabin interior, failed to comfort me as I sat abashed in a rocking chair near a pair of moose antlers propped atop a cabinet. The alcohol soon helped, though.

My cabin décor includes a fly rod, a wood-framed fly-fishing net, a hardwood pack basket, and a pair of rawhide-latticed snowshoes, none of which are of any use. And photographs and drawings of moose and deer, two taxidermy mounts of deer heads, and the shed antlers of both a moose and an elk. An antique crosscut bow saw, a tin advertisement for Wenonah canoes, a tanned beaver pelt. A bear trap. Salt and pepper shakers in the shape of bears standing on their hind legs. An art print of four 18th-century Mohawks and their two birchbark canoes at the start of a portage. A black-and-white photograph of a 19th-century wilderness guide and several of his “sports,” which is what Adirondack guides called their clients, posing before a lakeside log cabin, two of the sports holding up a stringer of trout. My display of these objects suggests that in my view, nature exists for human harvest and amusement—an outlook that vanishes, as does my attraction to transcendentalism, whenever I am lost in a forest or caught in a storm while canoeing a lake. Or when my roof leaks.

On most days, like many other Americans snug in their dwellings, I can pretend that I have the ability to escape nature, or at least to control it as easily as I can switch channels on the TV back at my house in southwestern New York.